A shell fired by Russian-led forces hit a house in a village of Troitske in Luhansk Oblast early on May 18, killing a father and a 13-year-old boy and wounding the mother of the family and an elder son, Pavlo Zhebrivsky, the head of Donetsk Oblast’s Military and Civilian Administration has reported on his Facebook page.
Zhebrivsky earlier reported that the mother of the family died in hospital but corrected his report later saying that a 36-year-old woman was alive but remained in a critical condition at the intensive care unit at a hospital in Lysychansk city.
The eldest son in the family of four was wounded in the leg by the shell blast.
“The shelling started at night — they all went downstairs to the basement and were there for quite a while,” Zhebrivsky wrote.
“When they thought the danger was gone, they came out of the basement and suddenly the last shell flew in.”
Zhebrivsky added that the family lived in the town of Myronivsky in Donetsk Oblast, but had a summer house in Troitske, a village of 1,400 residents, located just 20 kilometers from the area controlled by the Russian-led troops and just next to the Svitlodarsk bulge
— a salient in the defensive line of Ukraine’s army.
Ukraine’s Joint Forces Operation reported that Russian-led forces shelled Troitske at about 2 a.m. with 122-millimeter artillery. Ukraine’s military counted 15 explosions in the village.
Fighting continued all over the front line throughout May 17, with six Ukrainian soldiers receiving wounds, the military press service said.
A ceasefire called in April for the period of Orthodox Easter has now broken down, and the fighting in Russia’s war against Ukraine has intensified over the week, raising more fears about the civilians living near the front lines.
On May 17 a shell hit a school in the government-controlled city of Svitlodarsk.
On May 16 a shell also damaged a school in the village of Sakhanka, which is occupied by Russian-led troops, according to a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
